Last week I walked into one of the few remaining big box bookstores in North America and after eyeing the stacks of beautiful covers and interesting categories, I decided to peruse the Christian Living shelves.

I wish I could say I was shocked, but sadly, what I found was in keeping with the way I’ve watched Christian retailing and marketing transform over the past three decades (my first real job was as a cashier in a Christian bookstore when I was 16, and also sadly, that was three decades ago).

Christian retailing and marketing looks very much like all the other retail and marketing, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We want what we have to share to catch the eye of regular people and to draw them in, and we want what we’re producing to be of high quality.

But there’s a catch to all of that chasing marketability: What tends to sell in stacks at Costco isn’t deeply Biblical, unless it’s a stack of Bibles.

Just a few days after my impromptu trip to the bookstore, my 17-year-old daughter and I had a discussion about Christian books, and she told me that she is increasingly turned off by what she described as the “Rah! Rah! You are strong! You can do this! Dream big!” authors with big platforms who don’t ever seem to get to the core of anything other than what turns out to be really pretty Instagramable cheerleading. I sympathized, and then I turned to women (and one particular guy for a particular reason) in my life who pursue Jesus passionately and asked them,

“Which books, other than the Bible, changed your life?”

The responses were spectacular, and I especially appreciated how each one seems to be a reflection of how each of these believers lives their own lives.